Asked Thursday about new numbers showing Wisconsin lagging in job growth, Gov. Scott Walker pointed to the uncertainty he said business owners felt because of the political tumult that rocked Wisconsin early in his term.

Meanwhile, his critics said the governor’s policies had created a drag on growth.

“The first year we had a lot of protests in the state,” Walker said, during an appearance in Milwaukee to promote business growth in the city. “We had two years, almost, worth of recalls. A lot of employers here I think can relate to the fact (that) uncertainty is one of the biggest challenges for employers big or small or anywhere in between. There was a lot of uncertainty. The good news is that’s passed.”

Shortly after he took office in 2011, Walker and the Legislature essentially ended collective bargaining for most public employees. That sparked heated reaction inside and outside the Capitol and led to an unsuccessful recall-election challenge by Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett in June 2012.

The state’s slower-than-average job growth has spawned a running debate over causes and contributing factors. The job numbers have both economic and political implications, with Wisconsin’s high-profile governor selling his state as a business-friendly locale and touting his leadership as he faces re-election in less than two years and gets mentioned as a potential GOP presidential candidate in 2016.

While Walker has cited circumstances ranging from the protests and recalls to broader historical factors, his critics blame the job numbers on his policies.

They note that Wisconsin has fallen well behind the national rate of job growth since the governor took office, and argue that spending cuts and reducing the take-home pay of a few hundred thousand public workers have dampened growth.

“We have adopted economic austerity politics at the state level and the chickens are coming home to roost in terms of personal income growth and job creation,” said Mike Rosen, an economic professor at Milwaukee Area Technical College and president of the American Federation of Teachers Local 212.

Rosen pointed to a report by the U.S. Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis released Wednesday that ranked Wisconsin 41st in personal income growth from 2011 to 2012, reflecting in part declining earnings among state and local government workers.

“The only question is, ‘Why are we doing so poorly?’ ” said Jack Norman, former research director of the left-leaning Institute for Wisconsin’s Future. “The plunge in job growth, compared with other states, coincides exactly with Scott Walker’s time in office. This is no mere coincidence … Act 10 led to large cuts in public workers’ take-home pay, which was a blow to the state’s economy.”

Wisconsin is well behind pace to meet Walker’s 2010 campaign promise of 250,000 additional private-sector jobs in his first term.

In an interview last month, Walker was asked about the state’s slow pace of job growth and whether it was fair for people to judge him on those numbers.

He said it was, but he argued that some of the state’s job issues were long-standing, citing an aging population and what “some might argue, because our ancestry in some ways, (is) an unwillingness to take some risk in terms of investing in new start-up businesses, where much of the job growth is.”

The governor defended his regulatory and budget moves, but pointed to the political storm that they sparked, saying the protests and recalls “had a significant impact, not just through June 5 but probably for some time thereafter.”

He said any critique of the job growth in his term “should be done in context,” and he said his policies were pro-growth.

“As people move forward in the next year or two and look at our pace (of job growth), the other question they’re going to have to ask is, if they’re judging us, it’s not just a judgment (of) are you successful? But what more can be done, or what would someone do alternatively?” he said in the February interview.

State Democratic chair Mike Tate accused Walker in a statement Thursday of focusing more on presidential ambitions than the state’s economy, saying, “The day Scott Walker took office, we were 11th in job creation. Now, we are 44th, and it is a direct result of both his inattention and his policies.”

Walker’s office released a statement Thursday noting that the state lost more than 100,000 jobs overall during Democratic Jim Doyle’s second term (which coincided with the recession) and has gained jobs in Walker’s first term. Walker’s critics have pointed out that the state ranked much higher in job growth in Doyle’s last year (after the recession ended) than it has during Walker’s first term.

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